In her last moments, Laika
was confused and afraid—and if the facts of history had been different, she
just might have returned home. Laika had a brutal and painful death that we had
ever known.
Before the space program,
Laika had no home. She was a mongrel dog, found wandering the streets of
Moscow.
Strays, like Laika, were
sought out by the Soviet Union. While the Americans preferred to send monkeys
into space, the Soviets found dogs easier to train. They had a team that
gathered strays off the streets. The hardship these mutts endured, they
believed, made them tough enough to handle the harsh conditions of space.
She wasn’t the first stray
the Soviets had strapped inside a rocket. Another dog, named Albina, had
already flown halfway into orbit and made it back alive. She would be Laika’s
backup.
Another dog named Mushka
would be used to test the life support. Mushka, like Laika, was a stray, but
the hardships of the space program were too much for her. During training,
Mushka became so terrified that she wouldn’t touch her food.
Unlike Albina, Laika wasn’t
going to come back. The satellite they’d built wasn’t equipped for a safe
reentry. They knew that she would not survive the trip home. Laika would spend
a few days in orbit above the Earth. Then, she would be euthanized with poison
in her dog food.
Outside of the Soviet Union,
Laika’s doomed mission was an outrage. The British, in particular, campaigned
to stop the mission. The Daily Mirror ran an article with the headline, “The
Dog Will Die, We Can’t Save It.” The Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals urged people to call the Soviet embassy and complain. Others
held a moment of silence each day at 11:00 AM in quiet protest.
The Soviets didn’t
understand why they were so upset. “The Russians love dogs,” they responded in
a statement. “This has been done not for the sake of cruelty but for the
benefit of humanity.”
Laika, however, may have
been chosen because of the cruelty of the mission. According to some, Albina
was the first choice, but she was kept on the ground out of respect. Albina had
already done her job. Laika went into space so that Albina could live.
Laika’s death was avoidable.
In the original plan, Laika was to come home. The Soviets had boasted that she
would have all the comforts she needed to survive and return home safely.
All that changed, though,
because of Khrushchev. Khrushchev viewed Laika’s journey as a piece of
propaganda, and he wanted it timed to perfection. He wanted Sputnik 2 to blast
off on the 40th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he ordered the
scientists to rush the job so he could get the date right.
The original plans for a
return mission had to be scrapped. The scientists now had four weeks to make
the first spacecraft capable of sending a living thing into orbit. It was
enough time to do it, but not enough to make one that could come back.
“All traditions developed in
rocket technology were thrown out,” one of the scientists, Boris Chertok, said.
“The second satellite was created without preliminary design, or any kind of
design.”
Sputnik 2 was little bigger
than a washing machine. Inside, Laika wouldn’t even have enough space to turn
around, and, to make sure she didn’t, she would be chained in a single spot.
She would have the freedom to sit and to lie down and to do nothing else.
To get her ready, Laika and
the other dogs were put into smaller and smaller cages. She would be left
locked up in claustrophobic conditions for up to 20 days. Then she’d be pulled
into an even tighter space.
Trapped in the cages, the
dogs became constipated. They refused to relieve themselves, even when the
scientists fed them laxatives. The only way they could get them to adapt to
these spaces, the scientists learned, was to make them live through it, and so
the dogs stayed in their cages until they’d forgotten they’d ever been anywhere
else.
The day before the launch,
Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky brought Laika home. For the last four weeks, he had been
closer to her than anyone. He had led the team the picked Laika after the
streets, he’d trained her, and he’d personally chosen her to go into space.
Dr. Yazdovsky brought her
home so that his children could play with her. For one last moment before her
last day on Earth, he let her experience life as a domesticated dog with a
loving family. “I wanted to do something nice for her,” Dr. Yazdovsky said.
“She had so little time left to live.”
In the morning, she would be
put into a rocket, sent into space, and would never return. Dr. Yazdovsky
brought her to launch site and the team said their goodbyes.
“After placing Laika in the
container and closing the hatch, we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage,”
one of the men later said, “knowing that she would not survive the flight.”
Laika wasn’t launched that
day. For the next three days, she was grounded inside the spacecraft, waiting
on Earth. There had been a malfunction that had to be repaired, and so Laika
was kept in freezing cold temperatures, unable to move.
The scientists did their
best to take care of her. A hose from an air conditioner was set up to keep her
warm, and Dr. Yazdovsky had his men keep a constant eye on her. Finally, on
November 3, 1957, Laika took off.
As the spacecraft blasted
off of the Earth and into space, Laika panicked. Her heart rate and breathing
speed up to three times their normal rate as the small, confused dog tried to
understand what was happening to her.
When Laika became
weightless, she started to calm down. For the first time in Earth’s history, a
living thing was floating in space, seeing the Earth and the stars from outside
of its atmosphere. Her heart slowed, and she became to relax, but she would
never again calm down to the heart rate she had on Earth.
For years after the mission,
the Soviets claimed that Laika survived her first day in space. They claimed
that she drifted in orbit around the Earth for days. At last, she ate the
poisoned food they’d prepared for her and passed peacefully onto the other side
with the Earth below her.
The truth didn’t come out
until 2002, when one of the scientists, Dimitri Malashenkov, revealed the
brutal fate Laika really met. Laika died within seven hours, sometime during
her fourth circuit around the Earth, in excruciating pain.
The temperature control
system on the hastily built satellite malfunctioned. The shuttle started
getting hotter and hotter, soon going well past 40 degrees Celsius (100 °F) and
rising into sweltering extremes. Laika, who had calmed down when she’d become
weightless, began to panic once more.
On Earth, Laika had handlers
who calmed her when the training became stressful. Now, though, those
scientists could only watch the information tick in. They saw Laika’s her heart
racing faster and faster until they couldn’t pick up any heartbeat at all.
After five months and 2,570
orbits around the Earth, the satellite that had become Laika’s coffin fell down
to the Earth. It streaked across the sky while people around the world watched,
creating a small panic in the United States.
“Shortly after midnight on
April 14, 1958, UFO sightings were reported by reliable witnesses along the
east coast of the United States,” one report said. “They reported a brilliant
bluish-white object moving high across the sky at incredible speed. According
to reports, it suddenly turned red, and several small objects detached from the
main object and fell into formation behind it.”
The UFO was Sputnik 2, and
the detached objects were the pieces of the capsule being torn apart on
reentry. Laika and the capsule disintegrated as they rushed toward the Earth.
Her body never touched the ground.
Mushka, the dog who’d been
kept on Earth as a “control dog,” followed Laika into space a little later. She
was sent up in a rocket with a menagerie of dogs, guinea pigs, rats, mice,
fruit flies, and plants, meant to study the effects of cosmic radiation.
Mushka was to come home.
During reentry, however, the retro-rocket meant to slow her craft down
malfunctioned. She fell off trajectory and started to crash down toward the
Earth. The Soviets had no way of knowing where she would land, and they feared
it would be into American hands.
In press reports, the
Soviets claimed that Mushka’s spacecraft was burned up on reentry. The truth,
though, was that there were explosives onboard. Fearing that their secrets
would land in enemy territory, the Soviet scientists detonated the ship,
killing every animal onboard.
“The more time passes, the
more I’m sorry about it,” said Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists on the team.
“We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify
the death of the dog.”
Her trip into space was more
symbolic than scientific. It proved that a living thing could be sent into
space and survive, and, more importantly, that the Soviets could be the first
to do it. The decision not to bring her back, though, weighed on the group and
on the public. One Polish scientist called her death “undoubtedly a great loss
for science.”
Laika, however, invigorated
a world’s imagination for space travel. She paved the way for the future of
space travel. Less than four years after her launch, Yuri Gagarin would become
the first man in space, and he would come home safely.
The wax worm’s
potential was discovered by accident when biologist Federica Bertocchini
cleaned out her hives and temporarily placed the parasites in a plastic
shopping bag. Bertocchini is a part-time beekeeper, and is used to removing wax
worms from her hives, where the caterpillars like to munch on the beeswax
inside. After leaving a recently evicted troupe of wax worms in a plastic bag
one day, Bertocchini found that the worms simply ate their way out.
